-----Original Message----- From: Wojtek Sokolowski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 1999 12:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:10550] Re: RE: "MODERN SCIENCE is a product of capitalism" At 11:50 AM 9/1/99 -0700, Jim C. wrote: >If "modern science" is the only "science", then why is it that Incas, >Aztecs, Mayans, Mississippians and other Indigenous cultures were able to >construct cities and structures that, in terms of scale and precision, could >not be duplicated with the most advanced measurement and engineering methods >and instruments available today? Why is it that Indigenous cultures have had >remedies for various ailments for thousands of years and dietary regimens >that "modern" science is only now discovering (yew bark, green-lipped >mussels, Noni plant etc)? Why is it that Indigenous cultures have >traditionally employed non-linear and non-reductionistic paradigms that >"modern science" seeks today after the failures and irrelevance of the >ultra-reductionistic, positivist and linear paradigms and methods? > >The reductionist separation of scientific "method" from the content and >focus and scope of "scientific method" alows this notion of "value free" >or non-class or non-system specific "science". It is a myth in my opinion. Jim, I think you are confusing science with scientism - which is a form of positivist ideology. You have to distinguish genuine scientific research from intellectual commodity production at universities. Oftentimes, the product is pre-dtermined before the methodology is applied. i.e. needed conclusions are supplied by the sponsor, or a "discovery" is needed to obtain tenure, funding, patent rights or celebrity status. In such cases, indeed, scientific method is nothing more than a ritual, ex post facto rationalization to prop us the intellectual product. But that does not mean that the method is useless when applied to genuine research. There is plenty of opposition among genuine researchers to various reductionisms. I think part of the problem is your discipline - economics, especially the us variety, is pretty positivist and reductionistic, comparing to other social sciences. wojtek Wojtek, I agree with you here. My only point is that if one sees the scientific method as involving dialectially-related processes of adduction and deduction, with prediction and application and replicabilitiy as ongoing tests/purging devices, and if one sees adduction as a methodical process of deriving meaningful data from which progressivly wider and wider patterns, correlations, functional relationships, interrelationships, hypotheses, generalizations, principles, axioms and even "laws" can be "validly" formed and supported (not "proved" see Hume's Fallacy of Induction) or adduced, and then also involving meaningful as opposed to polemically-contrived deductions and applications, then it is obvious from the products, that Indigenous cultures have been employing "scientific method" for a long long time--even in non-Indigenous terms. Where I live here on the Oregon/Washington border, we have all sorts of physicists, geologists, anthropologists, economists etc claiming as "new discoveries", fundamental facts and relationships about "nature" and "society" that were explicitly or implicitly alluded to in Indian Lodge Tales going back hundreds of years. Jim C
